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Is On Page SEO Dead?

Search Engine Roundtable has published a short post about this a few days ago, quoting senior member at WebmasterWorld forums who said:

"The way I see it, on-page text today is for the "relevance" part of the total algorithm. The whole algorithm is, in broad strokes, "relevance + connectedness + quality". After you've clearly stated the relevance of the page, then the rest of your ranking power comes from elsewhere.

I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore.

And moving from a table layout to a CSS-P layout today might get you nowhere, too. It all depends how deeply complicated the table layout was, I think."

6 Responses

I love it when people proclaim the death of different factors. Every time someone believes it my job gets a little easier!

The author of that post said "I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore."

It's pretty clear that what they mean by "on-page seo" is actually "cheap tricks to get a ranking boost". Definitely not the same thing. On-page SEO to me means making the meaning of a page as clear as possible to a search engine.

That means using language that is aligned with that of searchers who you want to connect with, clear structure, good indicators through titles etc and a meta description that talks to those searchers and makes them want to click.

As you quote in your question, on-page factors go a long way towards deterining the relevance part of the search engines algorithm.

On-page factors are relatively easy to control/manage and as such tend to be the starting point when it comes to optimising a page/site. I don't think anyone would think about trying to get a page to rank without making sure the on-page optimisation was up to scratch first.

For competitive keywords, you're likely to find that your page will be up against other pages that have the same strong on-page relevancy. Compeiting just based on on-page will be impossible. Tweaking very minor factors such as putting your keywords in bold isn't going to make too much of a difference.

I don't think on-page is dead. I just think that now there's more awareness of on-page best practice and as a result the battle ground is all happening off-page.

One final caveat - it does depend on the niche/market you're competing in. You can still get quick wins using just on-page in the more uninformed niches! I wouldn't want to bet that it would be enough to stay there though...

Google has said publicly that a less than perfect site from a SEO perspective doesn't mean you won't rank well. However I don't think onpage SEO is dead, certain elements have a lot less importance, but it isn't dead.

A technically sound foundation on which to build all your future marketing efforts is important in my opinion. On their own, individual onpage factors (such as bold tags you mention) will have very little measurable impact on your bottom line. You shouldn't be using your time to measure these points in isolation, you could knock up a 500 word article in that time :)

However, having pages with keyword researched content, relevant title tags, crawlable navigation elements, good internal linking and social integration shouldn't be ignored on a site wide level. Especially if you are working on large sites with people adding new content regularly, having this platform/education inplace for onpage SEO gives you a lot of 'easy wins' which often get missed by the competition.

Focus on good structured markup, loadtimes, and well written, keyword researched content aimed at your market.

H1 tags, the value of conspicuously placing your keyword in H1 tags throughout the page is very questionable in terms of actual value.

However there is more to on page than just "Algorithm SEO Value" If your visible post or page title is tagged H1, which by default usually is tagged H1. Then you want your visitor to definitely see the targeted keyword or a synonym at the very least. Bounce rate and time on page is of exceptional value to the major search engines.

If you're page title "visible title" in the SERPs is the same or VERY similar to what the visitor sees when they land, a visitor is going to be a happier visitor when they arrive, happy visitors hang around longer and they interact more.

Alt tags, there is absolutely no doubt that a post or page that has images or info-graphics properly alt tagged will do better than a straight text block of text (all other things being equal) again, both for the visitor and for the SE to know what the essence of the article is.

Link Titles, that sounds like an off page element? If you mean anchor text, do you mean the anchor text of the "Interlinks" around your site, ie the links on your site that point back to the page in question, I can't imagine any reason in the world why those pointing links/anchor text would not be highly relevant to the destination page.

If you mean the anchor text on the page in question pointing to other pages on your site, again, I can;t imagine any SEO or Visitor value reason why anyone would place the Target Keyword on page A as the link anchor text to unrelated page B?

If you think there may be a problem with On Page being dead, try this:

Write the best article you can about your topic, really "the best" relevant, readable, resourceful, long and make the Title something completely different, do not add any images, or alt tag images incorrectly even, and do not point any links anywhere back to that page, and do not point any resource links off the page.

So, the article is about Laptops and the Page Title is Kitty Litter. The image is a graphic about the top 10 laptops, and it is alt tagged "Kitty Litter". No links anywhere.

You tell me how that page will rank, then wait patiently for 60 days and do all the On Page stuff you would normally do.

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